Humbug

AI-first tooling for your whole software lifecycle

Go beyond code completions - engineer software with AI

AI-powered app builders can turn ideas into demos. AI-powered IDEs can help you add new features at unprecedented speeds. But what happens after that? How do you maintain and evolve things, how do you deal with bugs and vulnerabilites, how do you add the next big feature and not break existing ones? The problem is, once you've finished those things the AI has no idea what you were trying to do, or why, so its ability to help reduces over time.

Humbug is an extensible, open-source, tool designed to do things differently.

At its core is Metaphor, an open source prompt creation language. Metaphor lets you capture what you want your software to do and all the information (context) an AI will need to help you develop and support that software throughout its lifecycle.

Metaphor lets you get to the "engineering" in prompt engineering. It helps massively increase the work that can be done by AI, and significantly reduces rates of hallucination by ensuring the AI doesn't have to guess what you want to build.

With Metaphor, you can also create tools and scripts that can be used with any of the supported AI models. You can take suggestions from a range of different AIs, and find the best one to help you meet each unique need.

Humbug in action
Humbug in action
Humbug in action
Humbug in action
Humbug in action
Humbug in action

Humbug uses a familiar IDE-style environment but it's built to have AI at its core. You can discuss your software, seek recommendations, get help designing and coding new and complex capabilities, or use it to understand and navigate what you have.

You can find out more on our YouTube channel.

Open and Extensible

We believe in the power of using AI in a different way, so Humbug is open-source, and that includes the Metaphor description we use to build and extend it. By doing this we've made it easy to extend and our aim to to ensure it will always provide the best possible experience when working with AI.

Capabilities

  • Integrated Metaphor compiler: Seamlessly integrate with the Metaphor language to let you script complex tasks to be solved by AI.
  • Multi-AI interaction: Interact with multiple AI models simultaneously
  • Wide range of AI models: Use AI models from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Mistral, Ollama, OpenAI, and xAI
  • Visible AI reasoning: See reasoning support from Anthropic, DeepSeek, and xAI AI models that support it
  • Cross-platform: Runs on MacOs, Windows, and Linux
  • Polyglot language support: Supports C, C++, CSS, Go, HTML, Java, JavaScript, JSON, Kotlin, Markdown, Metaphor, Move, Python, Rust, Scheme, Swift, and TypeScript
  • System command shell: Rapidly use tools and run Metaphor-powered scripts
  • IDE-style file editing: Edit files directly within the platform
  • Command line integration: Use command line utilities to help you

Try Humbug and Metaphor now

Download the latest version of Humbug for free:

For all other platforms, and for source code, head to: github.com/m6r-ai/humbug

Frequently asked questions

Have questions about Humbug? Visit our FAQ page to find answers to common questions about installation, supported platforms, AI models, and more.

Using Humbug with Metaphor

A tutorial showing how to use Metaphor within Humbug is available on GitHub: github.com/m6r-ai/hello-metaphor

View our YouTube channel

Find out more on our YouTube channel.

Connect with us

Join us on Discord, or follow us on LinkedIn, to find out more about how Humbug can help you.